Many of you have known me long enough to know the ladies that have come in and out of my life. And when I say ladies, of course I mean…my cars.

Installment #1

1980 WHITE VOLVO STATION WAGON
“White Lightning” aka “Chewy”

My sister Marie inherited the family Volvo Station Wagon when she got her license and I wanted that car so badly. When she went away to Florence, Italy for a year of school, I was a junior in high school and her car needed to go somewhere. I faintly remember my mom saying something like, “Just because Marie is going to Italy for a year, I don’t want you to think you’ll be able to do something like that when you are in college, but what you DO get is to drive the Volvo while she’s gone.” Now I realize that Marie actually paid for Italy (at least the getting over there and the day-to-day living aspects; my parents probably still paid tuition) but at the time I thought the Volvo was my consolation prize.

I loved my Volvo. I mean, I loved this car more than any other car I’ve ever had.

• She was almost as old as I was
• She had electrical problems so I sometimes had to start her under the hood, but this also meant that all the lights on the dashboard would blink at me from time to time, which I told people was just her way of talking to me like Kit on Knight Rider.
• She had a nasty dark blue leather-simulated but more plastic-like interior that would crack in the sun so my dad had sewn a dashboard cover out of denim and would stain it blue every few months after it faded from the light
• She had these grey fur seat covers which helped keep your legs from sticking to the seats on hot sweaty days (this was California, people), but my dad had spilled coffee on the passenger side so he had cut the seat part off and all that was left was a fur cover for the top part of the seat
• Her brakes would make this sound every time I pushed them that was reminiscent of Chewbacca from Star Wars, so we nicknamed her Chewy and I kept a Chewbacca Pez Dispenser on the Dashboard
• She had the best turning radius I’ve EVER encountered and I’ve driven over 50 different types of cars. When taking sharp last minute “teenager-like” turns, the blue denim dashboard cover would invariably slide right off into the passengers lap or almost out my window.
• She didn’t have any cup holders so my friends and I went through a series of poorly designed accessories meant to hold a beverage, but usually just snapped off and spilled all over. My favorite one being the one that hooks into your door in the space where the window goes up and down. Every time you rolled the window up, the holder would pop out and Pepsi would go all over your lap. Ultimately, my thighs were the best form of cup holder I had, or if I took out the Kleenex box, that was most likely still soaked in old Pepsi, from between the seats, I could prop my cup between my seat and the emergency brake (which never got used).
• You could fit an entire twin bed, box spring and mattress, in the back with the seats down. The seats laid flat and the door shut easily. You will never find a better car for carting stuff around. A true wagon.
• She had this armrest that came down in the middle of the back seat, which we called “the hump.” When I was a little girl, I always wanted to sit on “the hump” so I could see out. At some point, they stopped letting me because I got too big. And at another point, we got a van because the back seat was too small for three sisters who hated to share space, yet in high school we somehow managed to fit 5-10 people in there without any complaints or problems.

Eventually my sister came back from Florence and reclaimed Chewy. Luckily, I hadn’t seen the last of her. She would resurface in my life again and I would have one last hurrah before putting her to sleep.

Stay tuned for Installment #2 in “The Women Who Move Me.”